Biraderi, Bloc Votes and Bradford: Investigating the Respect Party's Campaign Strategy
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Peace, T. and Akhtar, P. (2015) Biraderi, bloc votes and Bradford: investigating the Respect party's campaign strategy. British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 17(2), pp. 224-243. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/144519/ Deposited on: 21 July 2017 Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Peace, T. and Akhtar, P. (2015), Biraderi, Bloc Votes and Bradford: Investigating the Respect Party's Campaign Strategy. The British Journal of Politics & International Relations, 17: 224–243, which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-856X.12057/full. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance With Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving. Biraderi, bloc votes and Bradford: investigating the Respect Party’s campaign strategy Abstract In March 2012, the Respect Party won an unexpected by-election in the British city of Bradford, previously regarded as a safe Labour seat. This paper examines the party’s campaign strategy and in particular how it courted South Asian Muslim voters. A dominant feature of South Asian Muslim politics in the UK has been community bloc voting along lines of kinship (biraderi). The use of kinship networks for political gain effectively disenfranchised many young people and women. We demonstrate how Respect used their experience of campaigning in constituencies with significant numbers of South Asian Muslim voters to achieve an unlikely victory in Bradford. A key strategy was to mobilise otherwise politically marginalized sections of the South Asian Muslim community by offering an alternative to the culture of patronage in Bradford whilst at the same time utilising certain community structures in order to gain their own bloc votes. Introduction The surprise victory of George Galloway in the 2012 Bradford West by-election and the subsequent success of the Respect party in the local elections later that year in the same city re-focused attention on the voting habits of South Asian Muslim communities in the UK. In particular, there was heightened interest in electoral mobilisation within these communities and the use of kinship networks or ‘biraderi’ for political gain.1 For many years, community leaders, who were often biraderi elders, were incentivised by local politicians to make 1 ethnicity-based claims for their communities and in return biraderi leaders endorsed those politicians who supported them, providing in effect a bloc community vote. This is known as ‘biraderi politicking’ (Akhtar, 2013) and the use of kinship networks for electoral gain has been in operation in Britain for many years. The principle of patronage underlying this arrangement was supported by both the Conservative and Labour parties who recognised it as their winning ticket into South Asian Muslim communities. It has been suggested that the support for Respect in the 2012 Bradford West by-election was, in large part, the manifestation of young South Asian-origin voters’ disillusionment from mainstream politics due to this patronage system, and more specifically, the relationship between biraderi elders and the local Labour Party (Baston 2013). This article investigates these claims and the campaign strategy of Respect, in particular, how it managed to simultaneously circumvent and harness the traditional community structures which have delivered bloc votes. We also assesses the extent to which Respect has relied on South Asian Muslim voters for its electoral successes. In this article, we draw upon our separate work on Muslim political participation in Europe, and specifically, South Asian Muslim political activism in the UK, to show that kinship and other religious/cultural networks were still key to Respect’s victory in the 2012 Bradford West by-election, even though the party openly criticised the use of such tactics by their Labour rivals. Since the 1970s, politicians in towns and cities across the UK with significant numbers of South Asians have drawn on the use of networks within the South Asian community to safeguard a bloc community vote. In recent years this has been criticised as a highly exclusionary practice as it values the decisions of mostly older men within the minority community and marginalises the voices of women and young people. In Bradford, as in many urban localities across the UK, British born South Asians were often frustrated by their exclusion from the political process, and George Galloway’s Respect 2 campaign in 2012 appealed to this generation of politically excluded young people. The Respect party offered an alternative to patronage within Bradford politics, giving voice to this disenfranchised section of the community whilst savvily utilising biraderi and other community networks to gain bloc votes. It was also able to appeal to a much wider constituency albeit by focusing on different issues. Recent research has shown the importance of well-directed local campaigning in the UK context (Johnston and Pattie 2003, Pattie and Johnston 2010). We demonstrate how Respect used their experience of campaigning in constituencies with significant numbers of South Asian Muslim voters to overturn the odds on one of the most unlikely UK by-election victories in recent years. Methodology The paper utilises qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with political activists and city councillors in Bradford, Birmingham and Tower Hamlets in East London. A total of 12 research interviews were undertaken in 2013 with Respect and Labour Party activists which focused on the Bradford West by-election. A wider archive of research relating to British South Asian political attitudes and behaviour has also been used. This includes primary interviews and participant observation material collected over a seven year period (2005- 2012).2 Such an archive of data over an extensive timeframe allows the authors to contextualise the Bradford West by-election in the wider trends of British South Asian political organisation and influence. We believe this offers a more nuanced understanding of the results in Bradford West by explaining the political and cultural context within which the election took place. We recognise that the use of biraderi mobilisation in the political process is highly contentious and, as such, there is the possibility that interviewees may have been reluctant to mention instances of themselves or party members engaging in the practice. For this reason anonymity was promised to interviewees who are not identified by name. Also, it 3 should be pointed out that one of the authors is from the Pakistani community, has grown up in one of the areas of research (Birmingham) and had been embedded as a researcher there since 2005, which meant there was sufficient time to build trust with respondents and to triangulate interview data with participant observation, thereby improving the robustness of the findings. Further analysis is provided with election results and data on ethnicity and religion from the 2011 census. We start by examining the concept of biraderi and its significance in the British political process. Kinship networks and voting in the UK Biraderis are networks of individuals and families that share a common ancestry. They function as hierarchical systems of social organisation and support, with land-owning biraderis such as the Rajputs and Jats at the top of the social order and the artisans such as the Mochi at the bottom of the scale. Biraderi broadly translates as patrialineage or descendants of the same blood line. In practice however, biraderis do include non-blood relatives through relatively porous boundaries of inclusion. This is especially true in the diaspora context where members of the same village in Pakistan, for example, may refer to each other in the new country context as being of the same biraderi. In the UK context, patterns of kin-based reciprocity amongst members of patrilineal descent groups have been an important feature of many South Asian communities. Biraderis have historically performed the function of facilitating processes of migration and settlement. Within the economic sphere, such networks have helped with upward mobility through, for example, the provision of interest free loans to biraderi members starting up new businesses or buying a house. In this article we focus on the realm of politics, and in particular, explore to what extent instrumental patronage through kinship networks has been, and how far it continues to 4 be, important in South Asian Muslim political processes in Britain, and how this has in turn influenced the Respect Party strategy in places like Birmingham and Bradford. It is important to note that political patronage amongst immigrant communities is not specific to the British Pakistani community. There is a long history of such communities pooling together resources through diaspora networks to gain representation in the host country’s political system. The most emblematic case being the Tammany Hall political organisation used by Irish immigrants in nineteenth century New York to secure political influence in their adoptive country (McDonald, 1994). Indeed, even amongst the majority community, political mobilisation and support is employed from different forms of social networks which can be construed as bloc voting, for example, amongst families, party lists, Trade Unions and lobby groups. By the 1970s, many of Britain’s industrial heartlands had significant numbers of ethnic minority communities, many from former colonial countries. They had a legal right to participate fully in UK politics, including the right to vote and to be candidates in local, national and European parliamentary elections (Anwar, 1994).3 The major political parties were attracted to ethnic minority voters because of their perceived electoral potential. The First Past the Post electoral system employed in the UK favours those parties whose support is geographically concentrated (Boucek 1998).